In Pictures: Size matters - a guide to tablets, great and small

From the teensy Galaxy Note to the Motorola Xoom, tablet computers come in all sizes. All prices are in $US.

Amazon Kindle Fire
Screen size: 7 inches
Resolution: 1024x600 pixels
Weight: 413 grams
Price: $199
The Kindle Fire outsold every tablet except the iPad last quarter and it’s easy to see why: The device was the first to be aggressively priced at $199 at its launch and it benefits from tight integration with Amazon’s cloud services.

The Apple iPad 2
Screen size: 9.7 inches
Resolution: 1024x768 pixels
Weight:608 grams
Price: $499
What else is there to say about the iPad? It’s the tablet that started it all by combining the slender build with an intuitive operating system and user interface. Hands-down the most popular tablet in the world today and will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future. The frenzy over a possible iPad 3 has been going on for months.

The Samsung Galaxy Note
Screen size: 5.3 inches
Resolution: 1280x800 pixels
Weight: 178 grams
Price: $649 without a two-year AT&T contract; $299 with contract
The Android-based Note debuted at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show and is Samsung’s attempt to create a hybrid between a smartphone and a tablet. Regardless of how you classify it, it’s smaller than any of the tablets listed in this slideshow.

Motorola Xoom
Screen size: 10.1 inches
Resolution: 1280x800 pixels
Weight: 708 grams
Price: $499
The Xoom may be a 10.1-inch tablet but it’s a heavy sucker, weighing better than 100 grams more than any other tablet we’ve reviewed. The Xoom earns a spot in history as the first tablet to run on Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”), which was the first version of Android to be specifically tailored for tablets.

Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet
Screen size: 7 inches
Resolution: 1024x600 pixels
Weight: 400 grams
Price: $199
The Nook is B&N’s attempt at creating a tablet that can compete with Amazon’s popular Kindle Fire. The tablets are very similar specs-wise, with the Nook weighing slightly less than its rival.

Although Apple’s iPad is the most popular tablet in the world, very few of its competitors have adopted its 9.7-inch screen size. Instead, we typically see tablets with screens of 7 inches at the smaller end and 10.1 inches at the larger end. In fact, the only tablet to adopt Apple’s screen size was the HP Touchpad, which was famously discontinued last summer. In this slideshow we’ll guide you through the various big-name tablets on the market from smallest to largest.

HP TouchPad
Screen size: 9.7 inches
Resolution: 1024x768
Weight: 740 grams
Price: Discontinued
The HP TouchPad had been just another failed iPad “killer” before HP decided to discontinue it and knock its retail price down to $99. Ding, ding, ding! We suddenly had a winner as the TouchPad’s super-low price made it fly off the shelves. More than anything, the TouchPad showed companies that they could move significant numbers of tablets if they successfully undercut Apple’s prices by a few hundred dollars or so…

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Screen size: 10.1 inches
Resolution: 1280x800 pixels
Weight: 565 grams
Price: $499
The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is pretty remarkable in that it has a larger screen than the iPad 2 but also weighs 35 grams less. This tablet is the largest rendition of Samsung’s popular Galaxy device series.

The BlackBerry PlayBook
Screen size: 7 inches
Resolution: 1024x600 pixels
Weight: 425 grams
Price: The 16GB model now sells for $199, but originally sold for $499
Ah, what could have been. If Research in Motion had released the PlayBook in its current incarnation – i.e., with a native corporate email application, with a native calendar application and priced at $199 – it could have been a hit. Unfortunately, RIM originally released the PlayBook without those key enterprise features at a price of $499 last year.

Ardic Technology’s monster 65-inch Android tablet
Screen size: 65 inches
Resolution: In the 1920x1080-pixel range
Weight: Likely more than 45,000 grams (i.e., in the 90-100 pound range)
Price: None
So the wacky guys at Turkish startup Ardic Tech last year decided to take a 65-inch LCD television and transform it into a gigantic Android tablet. No, you won’t be able to buy this monster in the near future, but she sure is fun to look at, isn’t she?

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